A photograph taken about 1880 of men who were dump-chute sorters at a mine in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
According to the description, the adult counterpart of the breaker boy in the era of deep-mining was the dump-chute sorter. While the boys sat on wooden boards in lower elevations of the breaker and picked late from smaller sizes of cola coming down a chute, the men stood at the dump-chutes at the top of the breaker and used poles with metal hooks to sort lumps of coal from rock and slate. Coal lumps went into one hole in the floor and slid down into crushers. Rock went into separate chutes and was loaded in cars for disposal on the slate banks which became part of the landscape where every colliery operated.
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Photo and information from Pottsville Republican and Herald, “Glimpses Into Yesteryear,” 30 September 1978.
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